dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  She tapped an icon on the tablet screen and connected to YETI back in London, via its video-over-satellite-Internet feature, the one that made FaceTime look olde worlde.

  Abernathy looked relieved when he saw her face on his computer monitor.

  “Ani,” he said, “status?”

  “Not good. Are you following all this online?”

  “The attack on Poiana Mazik by bugs from hell?” Even Abernathy looked surprised that this last statement had come out of his mouth. “We’re watching streaming video from the scene now.”

  “There are only two major problems with the coverage, as I see it,” Ani told him. “First, what you see on screen is not what’s happening here. Those creatures? The ones we’re seeing are much more clumsy-looking. Half-formed. Someone’s digitally manipulating the images. It could be Dorian. It could be victorious. It could be both working together.”

  “Send me a photo of what the real creatures look like.”

  “Give me a sec.”

  She lifted the tablet to take advantage of its rear-facing camera, sending the video straight to Abernathy to save time. She was shocked by the jarring disparity between what she saw with her eyes, and what the camera saw with its fancy optical lens. A horrible suspicion took root in her brain.

  “Are you seeing this?” she asked, urgently.

  “I’m seeing insects.”

  “It must be the Dorian chips,” Ani said. “They’re the conduits for the dotmeme data. The dotmeme file rewrites reality, augments it until it’s impossible to see what’s real and what isn’t. The Dorian chips spread it like a virus.”

  “It can’t be,” Abernathy said. “There aren’t any Dorian chips in that tablet you’re holding.”

  “Maybe there don’t have to be,” Ani said, dismissively. “There just need to be enough of them in the local area. There are Romanian villagers around here, and they’re all carrying smartphones. Maybe they … I don’t know … I’m thinking about the way that Dorian chips allow distributed processing … Look, this probably isn’t the best time for me to be trying to make sense of this. The creatures are …”

  Ani broke off.

  Suddenly, she wanted to be somewhere very far away.

  The only way to complete the sentence would have been to say: “… getting reinforcements.”

  Two more of the beasts were moving toward the villagers.

  When Joe saw another two creatures looming out of the darkness, he felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. With one of them shambling toward him, and three more ready to turn on him if that one failed, Joe was starting to dislike the odds of getting out of this unscathed. More villagers had come out of their homes—which gave them a numerical advantage at least—and some were armed with pitchforks, knives, and machetes. One had even brought a large hammer.

  Against two of the creatures, there might have been enough villagers to drive the things back into the woods.

  But four of them?

  When a hail of bullets had hardly slowed one of them down?

  The number of creatures had already doubled. Who was to say that there weren’t more on their way?

  It was all academic if Joe couldn’t take down the one in front of him.

  “Hey, soldier!” he shouted to the guy who’d fired at the thing and now seemed to be trying to figure out why it hadn’t gone down. “We need to get these civilians out of the kill zone.”

  The guy gave a sharp military nod, and he and the other soldier started shepherding the villagers away from the creatures and into a group. Then they put themselves and their guns between the two factions. Dr. Ghoti had helped the injured villager to his feet and walked him, albeit slowly, to the comparative safety of the two-soldier-cordon.

  The creatures moved toward the group, but the soldiers kept them from getting too close by squeezing off multiple shots. The noise was shockingly loud and some of the villagers covered their ears. It was all sound and fury, but it signified little because, again, the bullet hits didn’t seem to significantly hurt the creatures. Still, they tore through their flesh, making them look messier. The creatures hesitated as the bullets smashed into them, but started moving again as soon as the gunfire stopped. Joe thought that enough shots had to take them down eventually. It all depended on how much ammunition the soldiers had brought with them.

  Still, at least the creatures’ reaction to the attack showed a cautious distrust of the weapons.

  The creature he’d already fought with had finally dragged itself close enough for round two, but if bullets hadn’t stopped it then, Joe seriously doubted that he could beat it with his fists. Living to fight another day seemed more important, so he dodged the creature’s slow grab and headed toward the other human beings.

  As Joe ran over, Ani thought he looked slightly crazed. His eyes were wide, his breathing ragged, and there was just something about him that looked different. Then she realized it was that he was both wired and exhausted, and the fight for control of his body was making him look … well, intense.

  “Good to see you, Joe,” she said. “I don’t suppose you know what’s going on here?”

  Joe shook his head. “We need to compare notes, try to understand what we’re up against. Have you seen the way these things look through a phone app?”

  “Bugworld. Something’s interfering with the phone software, and our cameras are hallucinating. Digital delusions.”

  “Digital delusions?” Joe said. “Sounds like a X-Core band name. Right. We need to get these villagers where they’ll be safe, and then we need to have a council of war. You in touch with Abernathy?”

  “Yep. Satellite broadband.”

  “Didn’t know there was such a thing.”

  “Me, either. Oh, and it’s better than my home broadband. Anyway, let’s get this show organized.”

  Ani approached the group of pretty terrified villagers and got their attention. “Hey,” she said, “does anyone here speak any English?”

  A young man nodded and stepped forward. “I can do,” he said. “It’s not best, but maybe good enough, yeah?”

  Ani smiled.

  “Good enough for me,” she said. “We need to get these people inside, somewhere safe that we can protect.”

  “Especially if more of those things turn up,” Joe said. “How did you get here?”

  “Private jet, armored car,” Ani said.

  “Still loving the job, Ani?”

  “More with every passing minute.” She turned to the villager. “What’s your name?”

  The guy was in his early twenties, and dressed in an odd mix of the traditional—a simple sweater with an open neck, a home-woven scarf—and the modern—blue jeans and sneakers. He had an earnest face, with golden-brown eyes that glittered in the cellphone ambiance and torchlight.

  “Razvan,” he said. “Razvan Ionescu.”

  “Good to meet you, Razvan. I’m Ani. This is Joe. Can you think of somewhere we can take your … er, is it all right to say comrades here?”

  She’d become self-conscious about using a word that could be construed as a relic from the communist-era dictatorship the country had once been. Reading about the country you’re visiting on planes—priceless.

  Razvan chuckled at her attempt at cultural sensitivity in a way that said it really wasn’t expected.

  “Comrades is—how you say?—okey dokey,” he told her. “We have a church, you probably passed it on your way into the village.”

  He pointed back toward the village, away from the creatures, which was as good a reason as any for making it their destination.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “Let’s get everyone heading there. Razvan, tell your friends to head for the church. Let’s go.”

  The church was made of wood. Completely. The level of craftsmanship was astonishing, with carved arches and intricately carved biblical scenes. It looked like all the wood had been harvested and hewn from the forest. Local crafts, but not a wobbly table, or a magazine rack, no, a whole damned church.
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  It was deceptively big, too, with an interior large enough to accommodate the whole village. Which it had to now, with a few additions from YETI. They had gotten the last few people out of their homes on the way to the church, and now the villagers were sitting at the carved pews directing their prayers to whichever variant deity they worshipped here.

  Ani thought that their prayers might help calm them down, stop them giving in to panic, but any answers were going to be found by more earthbound means.

  The YETI members—with Razvan inducted into their ranks, and Furness and Gilman standing guard outside—huddled in a corner and tried to think their way out of the crisis.

  “First order of business,” Joe said. “What the hell are those things?”

  “Impossible,” Dr. Ghoti said. “If I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes, I would say that they were utterly impossible.”

  “Impossible is something I’m redefining today,” Joe said. “I think these things are from the Dorian factory. Maybe it’s what they’re making these days.”

  Something crossed his mind, and he broke off and looked off into the distance. Ani doubted he was seeing anything that wasn’t inside his own head.

  “Joe?” she urged. “Put the thought into words.”

  He rubbed his face with his hand, and then looked at her.

  “You’ll think I’ve lost it,” he finally said.

  “Try me.”

  “Okay, I’m here investigating the disappearance of some Dorian chips from a factory a few miles back through the wood.”

  “Us, too.”

  “I thought you were working the victorious case.”

  “Same case,” Ani said. “Tell me about the factory.”

  “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Joe said. “The staff there … they’ve been brainwashed. I even saw the machines that they use to do it.” Joe called up the photos of the booths up on his phone and Ani, Mina, and Dr. Ghoti examined them carefully. Dr. Ghoti pinched to zoom right into one of the clearest.

  “I can’t see how these could brainwash anyone,” she said. “There’s nothing here that looks capable of such a feat.”

  Ani had another look at the zoomed photo, and then zoomed in even further.

  “What are these?” she asked, tapping her fingernail on a strange arrangement of holes in the walls and ceiling of the booth.

  “High-tech showerheads?” Mina said. “Ventilation holes?”

  “I think they’re holes that acid comes out of,” Joe said, flicking to the picture of the melted thing in the end booth. “I think they melt the workers that don’t take well to their conditioning or that misbehave or something.”

  “It doesn’t look like it’s been melted, though,” Dr. Ghoti said. “It looks deformed. Or damaged.”

  “Wait a minute.” Ani swiped back to the photo they’d been looking at before. She zoomed in again and studied the holes and their strange arrangement. It was irritating. She thought she’d seen something—not exactly the same, but similar, recently. She struggled to think when, where, and what.

  “Oh,” she said, as she felt things connecting up in her brain, lining up like three bars on the middle line of a slot machine. Well, two bars and a lucky 7. It just took a nudge. “Oh, my goodness.”

  Everyone looked at her.

  “You can’t get a girl committed to an asylum for talking crazy, can you?” Ani asked of Dr. Ghoti.

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I’m about to sound completely insane.” Ani said. “I’m just going to invite someone else to the discussion.”

  She called Abernathy up on the tablet, and then told them all what was on her mind.

  Joe had seen that look on Ani’s face before, back when she was making most of the breakthroughs on the dotwav case. It was a relief to see it now, because without her intuitive leaps and imaginative speculations, it was hard to see how any of the things that were happening tied together in any way, shape, or form.

  “I keep coming back to the fact that victorious predicted this happening,” Ani began. “Not that creatures would attack somewhere. That they would attack here. In Poiana Mazik. And that makes everything here either impossible, or just very, very contrived.

  “Do any of us believe that people can predict the future? Not future trends or possible outcomes, but predict actual events that have never occurred before.”

  “Of course not,” Mina said. “Precognition is the stuff of science fiction. And the only people who claim to possess it are charlatans.”

  Ani nodded.

  “So victorious either had inside information about what was going to happen here, or they caused it to happen. The thing is …”

  A staccato chatter of gunfire from outside the church made her tense and pulled her out of the moment. She looked like the kid she was, especially in the wan electric lighting of the church. The sounds outside reminded Joe of the knife edge they were all balanced upon, villagers and YETI members alike.

  Razvan was at the church window, looking out into the night.

  “Soldiers keeping them back so far,” he reported. “Hope they brought many bullets along with them today.”

  “I’m scrambling you some reinforcements,” Abernathy said from the tablet screen. “But they’re still a way out from you. Ani, you were just weaving us a hypothesis, and I’d certainly like to hear what you’ve got there. If it helps, the Internet and now the TV news, are reporting events using exactly the same phrases you played off the recording you and Dr. Ghoti made. Your dotmeme file is, as they say, going viral.”

  “Dotmeme file?” Joe asked.

  “An archive of information that showed up on the Internet the moment all this started happening,” Ani explained. “It came from victorious, but we have no idea what it really is or what it’s for. But I’m certain it’s a part of something bigger. Dorian Systems is involved. I think they’re picking up victorious’s bills, supplying them with tech, especially those chips that sent you to LA, then brought you here.”

  There were more rattles of gunfire, but this time it hardly interrupted the flow of conversation. Joe thought that it was kind of odd just what you could get used to.

  “You said that maybe those … creatures are what Dorian is making these days, Joe. What if you’re right?” Ani looked intense, and more than a little scared. “You see, those booth things rang a bell somewhere in my head, but it took a little while to work out why. victorious was using a 3-D printer to make masks, and that printer looked like a miniature, simplified version of the things in those photos.”

  Joe’s mind was racing, but not quite getting there.

  “You’re saying … what exactly? Wait. Wait a bloody minute. You’re saying that Dorian Systems’ latest invention allows them to 3-D print … monsters?”

  “I know how it sounds,” Ani said. “And I know we’re decades away from the kind of tech I’m thinking of, but have you heard of 3-D bioprinting?”

  Dr. Ghoti jumped in.

  “It’s the manufacture of living tissue using 3-D printing techniques,” she said. “Instead of ink or plastic, the machines print using living cells. It could be the greatest breakthrough in medicine since … well, since we discovered antibiotics. But it’s still in its absolute infancy. We can print skin tissue, blood vessels, nerve grafts, but we’re years away from printing even rudimentary replacement organs. Kidneys will probably be the first artificial organ we do print—it’s the simplest—but to make a living creature … we must be a hundred years away from that kind of application, if it’s even possible.”

  “But still they come,” Ani said, somewhat cryptically. “Look, those creatures out there came from somewhere. We can all agree on that, right? So what are we saying? That they’re a tribe of Romanian Bigfoot who have been living in these woods, and they’ve just now decided to make an appearance? Or that they’re … what? Aliens? Cold war communist monsters from caves under the mountains? They look … I don’t know … unfinished, to me. And they look almost iden
tical to one another. They’re naked, and I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but they don’t seem built to procreate…. So let’s open our minds real wide: what if they are man-made? Products of the Dorian factory. Bio-printed slaves. Before it settled on the name victorious, the hacking collective I’ve been investigating was once called golem.”

  “Golem?” Joe asked. “From Lord of the Rings?”

  “I think Ms. Lee is referring to the Jewish legend,” Abernathy interjected from the screen of her tablet. “A creature fashioned from the earth and brought to life by magic. The Hebrew word for truth would be inscribed on the creature’s forehead, animating it with … Oh.” Abernathy broke off, then let out a hollow laugh. “Joe?” he asked. “Do you remember when I told you that we managed to get a name out of one of the gang in Luton? I said it was an alias, that we didn’t know whether it was a first name or a last?”

  “Of course,” Joe said. “One of the hired goons said that the man in charge of the operation was called Emmett. Why?”

  “That Hebrew word for truth,” Abernathy said, grimly. “The word that you write onto a golem to get it to rise up and do your bidding. It’s emet.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  AWAKEN, MY MASTERS

  Instead of having the time and headspace to process the information, as so often happened in the field, things went really wrong, really quickly.

  The prelude was an automatic rifle solo in the key of F for “frantic.” It was immediately joined by the mimicking call of the other rifle. They both chattered away until the magazines needed to be swapped out—there was a break—then they started up again.

  Ani didn’t need to be an expert to know that meant things were changing outside, and not for the better.

  Razvan was still watching the main street through the window, and when he reported back on what he was seeing, the urgency in his voice told them all they needed to know about how bad things were getting out there.

  “There are more of those things now. And they’re coming.”

  The guns spat rhythmically, then frantically, then fell silent.